ftment; but Pythagoreanism, as an organized
instrument of the Spirit, passed. When Aeschylus made his
protests in Athens, the Center of the Movement to which he
belonged had already been smashed. Plato did marvels; but the
cycle had gone by and gone down, and it was too late for him to
attempt that which Pythagoras had failed to accomplish.

So Rome, when she needed it most, lacked divine guidance; so
drifted out on to the high seas of history pilotless and
rudderless;--so _Weltpolitik_ only corrupted and vulgarized her.
She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no
Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight;
and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and
great men arose, once, twice, three times, to do their best for
her, she fell to pieces at last, a Humpty-Dumpty that all the
king's horses and all the king's men could never reweld into
one;--and the place she should have filled in history as Unifier
of Europe was only filled perfunctorily and for a time; and her
great duty was never rightly done. _Hinc lacrimae aetatum_--hence
the darkness and miseries of the Christian Era!

Take your stand here, at the end of the Punic War, on the brink
of the Age of Rome; and you feel at once how fearfully things
have gone down since you stood, with Plato, looking back
over the Age of Grecce. There is nothing left now of the
high possibilities of artistic creation. Of the breath of
spirituality that still remained in the world then, now you can
find hardly a trace. A Cicero presently, for a Socrates of old;
it is enough to tell you how the world has fallen. Some fall, I
suppose, was implied in the cycles; still Rome might have gone
to her more material duties with clean heart, mind, and hands;
she might have built a structure, as Ts'in Shi Hwangti and Han
Wuti did, to endure. It would not be fair to compare the Age of
Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with
the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot
but see, if we look at both dispassionately and with a decent
amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had
affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe
that the work of the Western Teacher had failed. Chow China and
Republican Rome fell to pieces in much the same way: in a long
orgy of wars and ruin;--but the rough barbarian who rebuilt China
found bricks to his hand far better than he knew he